The NCAA has announced a number of changes to the Rules of Racing that will apply during the NCAA Division I Rowing Championships, effective in 2013. Most are minor changes to better accommodate the addition of schools receiving Automatic Qualification bids, but some major revisions to the customary rules are also in the offing.
Among the minor changes is a recommendation that the lower seeds in each heat wear their dark, "away" unisuits to make the top seeded crew--wearing white "home" uni's--easier to pick out on television, particularly during wide, cutaway shots from blimps or the top of the Crown Plaza. Another change requires teams to stop using what the document calls "bow-coxswained" fours, because "having the coxswain sitting up in the rear of the boat more fully involves that student-athlete in the championship experience."
Perhaps the most controversial change is the NCAA's plan to drop the breakage rule. Breakage, which permits a race to be stopped and restarted in the event of equipment malfunction has long been an important rule at all levels of rowing competition, including the Olympic Games. The NCAA Rules Committee, however, feels that stopping an event in progress due to bad luck could set a dangerous precedent for other NCAA championships and mandated the change.
"Imagine if Duke got to restart a basketball game because their shooters were 'cold' in the first two minutes of the game," said one NCAA official on the Rules Committee. "Or if a fumble on an opening kickoff in a BCS could be negated. This rule unfairly disadvantages those crews that had a clean start to the race and, quite frankly, got a lucky break." It is just another "anachronistic rowing rule, like the shirt thing," he added, " that needs to be dropped as the sport moves into the modern, NCAA era."
The NCAA sees a number of advantages to dropping the breakage rule: "Eliminating the chance that a race might need to be re-started or re-run will help the event run on time, which will be popular with our media partners," said the Chair of the Rowing Committee, "And we anticipate that this change could create some exciting upsets in the early rounds of the Championship: breakage or a crab in a top-seeded boat could open the door for an AQ school from a smaller conference to advance to the next round. Upsets like that have been pure gold for March Madness, and we need a way to bring that kind of excitement to rowing and its fans."
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